by Brad Warner

Before we get started, I’m looking for places along the East Coast of these here United States to give talks, lead retreats, show the movie about me, play 0DFx gigs maybe, eat pad thai and just generally hang out.

There’s been some interest expressed by folks down south, in Nashville, Atlanta, Richmond, Asheville… Places like that. Maybe I could do a brain boiling Southern Summer Tour.

Or I could be smarter and head up north to avoid some of the summer heat in Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, Saskatoon…

It’s all up to who invites me.

Also, the weekend of April 26-27, I will be in the Boston area. Does anybody want to set up a talk or something while I’m there?

I am happy to consider a huge range of things. I’ve spoken at Zen Centers, tattoo parlors, people’s living rooms, etc. I’ve run retreats in places that were specifically designed for meditation retreats and I’ve done them at yoga studios, apartments, libraries, etc.

* * *

Yesterday I came across a short YouTube video that I found intriguing. Here it is:

The title was “Math Professor DESTROYS Atheist.” I often click on videos with titles like this because I find them endearingly stupid. Nearly anything with a title ending in “OWNS Atheist” or “DESTROYS Atheist” is bound to be silly. The use of ALL CAPS clue you in that it’ll be especially inane. The various arguments that religious fundamentalist think absolutely prove God exists are usually so ridiculous and full of logical holes that I find myself wondering how anyone finds them compelling.

This one isn’t really that great either. It’s a bit more clever than most, though. A number of commenters on the clip say that the math prof is using something they call the “Ignorance Fallacy.” I had to look that up. Here’s what I found. It says, “an ignorance fallacy occurs when a person mistakenly believes something to be true that is not, because he or she does not know enough about the subject to know otherwise. For example, an argument based on stereotype or hasty generalization is an example of ignorance fallacy. Such an argument is persuasive because the audience is ignorant.”

I’m not sure I see how the math prof’s argument is based on that (and none of the commenters who call it that seem to believe they need to say more than those two words). The flaw I find in it is that he says a creative mind can create a universe out of nothing. But this creative mind wouldn’t be creating a universe out of nothing since the creative mind itself would have to exist prior to the universe it created. So that’s not nothing. At best it’s a creative mind floating around in nothingness.

All the arguments for the existence of God that I’ve come across fall apart at this point, if not before. If everything needs a creator, which these guys often say proves God must exist, then who created God? And if God has existed forever, what the hell was he doing before he created the universe? It must have been awfully boring.

Logical arguments for the existence of God are really only useful for providing cheap entertainment. Yet I believe in God. If you want to know why read my latest book.

But what our math professor says about “mind” got me thinking about the fundamental difference between the Buddhist idea of mind and our usual idea of mind. The math prof in the video says that the orderliness of mathematics points to the existence of a mind behind it.

I’ve seen a lot of non-religious people say things that are somewhat similar. We may not believe in God, at least not the kind of God who creates universes because he’s bored, but it is intriguing that the universe is orderly rather than chaotic. That’s a valid mystery. Solving that mystery by envisioning a gigantic white man who decided to make things orderly is silly. But just because that’s not a valid solution doesn’t make the mystery any less mysterious.

The thing about our usual concept of mind is that mind is always paired with a possessor. It’s my mind, your mind, Frank’s mind, Linda’s mind, etc. It’s difficult for us to picture a mind that isn’t possessed by someone. So if there is a mind at work in the fabric of the universe, it has to be someone’s. And the only someone who could have a mind that big would be God. God is the someone who possesses the mind that created the universe.

The Buddhist notion of mind, though, is often presented in the sutras as not having anyone who possesses it. It’s not the mind of God or Buddha. It’s just mind. And mind is not the creator of the universe. It’s an aspect of it.

Buddhist cosmology is almost topsy-turvy of the way we usually envision how stuff works. The 12-fold chain of co-dependent co-origination goes:

1. Ignorance (avidyaã€€ç„¡æ˜Ž)

2. Action (samskaraã€€è¡Œ)

3. Consciousness (vijnanaã€€è­˜)

4. Name and Form (nama-rupaã€€åè‰²)

5. Senses (sadayatanaã€€å…­å…¥)

6. Contact (sparsaã€€è§¦)

7. Feeling (vedanaã€€å—)

8. Love (tirshnaã€€æ„›)

9. Taking (upadanaã€€å–)

10. Existence (bhavaã€€æœ‰)

11. Birth (jatiã€€ç”Ÿ)

12. Aging and Death (jaramaranaã€€è€æ­»)

Consciousness, which most people I know identify with mind, is #3 on this list. Most religious folks or New Agers would put it as Big #1 and probably call it God or Mind or even (gak!) Big Mindâ„¢. But Buddhism doesn’t give it that coveted spot. Even in the formulation of the Five Skandhas, which are the constituents of what we call a person as well as what we call the universe, consciousness is way on the end (Form, Feelings, Perceptions, Impulses, Consciousness). (You can read more about the 12-fold chain in my book Sit Down and Shut Up, and about the Five Skandhas in Hardcore Zen, by the way)

So I feel like our mathematician is onto something. But he gets it wrong. It’s not that there is a mind behind the universe and its creation. Yet it is reasonable to include mind in with the other things that make up the universe.

Because we have a very mechanistic view of things and because we think that a mind is always possessed by a someone, it’s hard for us to come to terms with the idea that mind is part of things. We falter and say that if there is a mind it has to be someone’s mind but we can’t rationally come up with any someone who could have a mind like that. All the someones that we can posit who would be of that order of size, age and complexity also turn out to be kind of ridiculous when we examine them in any detail.

I think our mathematician is at least partially correct. There is a mind involved in all of this. It’s just not someone’s mind. The mind that we each imagine that we individually possess, that we imagine is ours and ours alone, turns out not to belong to us at all. It doesn’t belong to anyone. But we know it exists because… well, otherwise who is reading these words?

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I wouldn’t mind some donations (see what I did there?). This blog is free but my rent and electricity are not. Your donations help me survive. Thank you!

Eh. I was sort of with him until he went into the whole “free will” thing and dismissed the brain simply as a “computer” based on some kind of study done in Germany a decade ago. S0-called “free-will” is an abstract idea that neither exists nor doesn’t exist. It’s literal gibberish, and therefore it cannot be “disproved” nor needn’t be.

The brain is not a “computer” and the body is not a “machine.” I hate these two metaphors because they create perceptions that are so wrong. Computers run on a series of zeroes and ones–binary code, and therefore–despite what many claim–will never have consciousness. The binary code is self-limiting by its very nature. Our best guess at the moment is that the brain runs on some kind of “non-symbolic” algorithms. But even the researchers who believe this have a tough time using those algorithms to make accurate predictions about such things as whether a person will choose to drink coffee or tea. Now, whether the brain runs on some kind of non-symbolic algorithms or not, it’s not running on a “code.” It is not self-limiting. The brain (and “small-mind” consciousness) will forever be plastic and malleable, capable of learning new ways to learn.

Also, neuroscientists have not learned nearly as much as many people believe and would have you believe. Nassim Taleb goes into this issue much more clearly and coherently than I would be able to, but I would encourage you read some of his work. The primary problem, as I understand it, is that neuroscientists treat the brain in as much as a vacuum as they can create, but the brain doesn’t work in a vacuum. It exists in a random, absurdly complex environment and it is reacting to trillions of pieces of information at any given moment and a change in one of those trillions of pieces of info (much less a more realistic change in millions or billions of pieces of info) influences how the brain reacts.

The whole brain is a computer/body is a machine thing irks me too. It seems like, inevitably, whatever the most complex thing we as a species have invented becomes a metaphor that explains life or the universe. Like all the descriptions of the universe as functioning like a clock or god being like a watchmaker when the clock/watch was the most elegant and complicated thing we could make.

You say that he is of those you “find them endearingly stupid”, you debunk what he says but in the end your theism overrides everything and you find him “at least partially correct”.

Is there some detox for it?

My take is that our mind isn’t made to think beyond a certain point, evolution produced us to eat, reproduce, avoid dangers and the complexity of our brains allows to make and implement projects.
Is our mind made to describe what masters experienced if not in terms that didn’t fit very well, with contorted wording of unclear meanings?
Is the green i see the same as the one you experience?

Is that during meditation we experience,/feel a force/field, whatever/something/WTF? and does it has to be “god/God”?

Does it has to be “something” at all?

The are things that Siddharta G. himself (ipse dixit of olds) left untold and considered non essential to the solution of the problem at hand :
– suffering from illness
– suffering from old age
– suffering from death

I find interesting that you agree, when it’s good, with Gudo for instance in considering Vajrayana (tibetans) non-buddhists, and disagree for other things.

He makes very clear that whatever “experience” you have, it’s just whatever happens in your brain and even if it really really feels like it’s “big mind” or whatever…you can’t get out of that tunnel! So give up…?! 😀

I haven’t watched the video yet. But I’d say our experience may not be limited to what happens in the brain. The Yogacara Buddhists believe in a philosophy of Mind-Only. This doesn’t mean that only the mind exists, but that whatever we experience is of the mind. So it’s similar to saying what you’ve said. But it doesn’t identify mind with the physical organ.

The Heart Sutra says that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. One way of re-expressing that is that mind is body and body is mind. Buddhists go pretty far with the concept of body, too. Body is identified not just as my 5 foot 8 inch tall frame but with the entire universe.

So in Buddhist terms, it may be ultimately irrelevant even to say that everything is Mind Only, or that all we experience is what the brain experiences since the brain is part of the body and part of the universe.

It’s all down to where you say “I” ends. It may not end where we imagine it does.

I think I get the idea and from my experience so to speak it feels the same way. Now the thing is that when science comes in…you can either ignore it or not. When it comes to the everything-is-one thing and that there is no “I” that from my understanding is completely in agreement with science. There was the big bang where pure energy exloded into “stuff” and there’s no way to seperate “me” or anything from anything basically. This really is something that…and here we are back “the mind does”. Now let’s say “the mind” is the brain in our case, it’s the part of this body that generates mind. Of course without anything else out there, the brain wouldn’t work and it couldn’t find any objects to work with.

But from a scientific point of view it currently looks like without a working brain there is no mind going on in that part of the universe. There are simply too many studies and proven experiments that have been done that show very clear evidence of that fact. If you remove or by an accident certain parts of the brain are damaged, mind changes radically. And in deep sleep or in a nacoticed state, mind stops.

Because of that I simply can’t really accept that mind is beyond the brain. Even though my own experience from meditation and satori stuff where “me” dropped away for a split second I would totally agree with you. But then I’d ignore science and I don’t think that’s the right way because trusting your internal experience only we’d still believe the earth is flat etc… – but I’d like to ignore science here to be honest – unfortunately I can’t 🙁

I don’t know if the experiments & studies you’re referring to really prove that mind is a thing created by the brain. I tend to feel that the brain senses mind and when it is damaged it loses that ability. Of course, this mind is not *my* mind. So *I* disappear once the brain becomes inoperable or sufficiently damaged. But that doesn’t mean that mind disappears entirely.

Also, I have had the experience of mind functioning perfectly well in deep, dreamless sleep. It was a deeply weird experience. I can’t even say that I remember what it was like because the part of me that remembers wasn’t functioning. Yet I do recall it happening.

I had some really weird experiences too, also while sleeping. Now the question is was it really deep sleep or did you just have the experience of deep sleep. But at the end I guess it comes down how much you believe your experiences…one example of this is out-of-body experiences. I’ve had those and thought they’re somehow real but neuroscience can trigger those by stimulating certain areas of your brain for example…

Then again I too totally feel like if my brain slows down a bit I connect to something that feels so huge that size doesn’t apply at all anymore. It’s infinite. But is it just an illusion…like out-of-body-experience…who knows 🙂

I would encourage you to check out (if you haven’t already) Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan.” It’s a book about skepticism and the randomness of the world. There are a couple of sections where he points out how science–outside of physics– hasn’t really proven itself to be as accurate or as honest as its practitioners have portrayed it. For example, should human beings be eating eggs or not? Is the calcium found in milk easily absorbed by the human body or not? Is long distance running healthy or detrimental to health? Science has not answered any of these questions (and many others) definitively. If they can’t answer if eggs are good for us, how can they know something as intricate and complex as the brain? (or check how few diseases we’ve cured in the last 60 years or so, or how cancer survivor rates haven’t improved in something like 50 years.)They don’t, and Taleb gives a pretty concise but convincing argument about the limitations of neuroscience at this point in time.

Of course this doesn’t mean we disregard science and retreat back into the dark ages, or that we stop trying to learn and improve our scientific techniques. It just means we have to be aware of where it is helpful and quite effective and aware of where it is not as effective.

Beyond that, on a more philosophical level, there’s also the “Hard” Problem of consciousness, which David Chalmers has written quite a bit about. Chalmers gives science the benefit of the doubt and says, “Sure, we know which regions in the brain produce hearing and taste and touch and smell and sight (the “soft” problems).” But he points out that nothing in the science comes close to explaining consciousness itself–the experience of experiencing. He refers to it as “qualia.” It’s actually interesting to read the responses to his arguments, because most scientists I don’t even think understand what Chalmers is talking about.

Apologies for the cliche, but mind is what the brain does. There is an everyone’s mind to the extent we share the same brain structure which is the product the same evolutionary process, and we’re all made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe. We also share the same problem tackled by Buddha, Dogen, Jesus and every other human being who’s experienced an existential crisis– what to do with all this self awareness slapped in a terminal state? I do not see a conflict between a materialist view of existence/mind and Four Noble Truths or Genjokoan. For me it’s all about realizing my brain’s ability to recognize patterns, while pretty darned interesting, has almost nothing to do with reality, and every day I have to wake up to that again and again. Asking for a why, a prime mover, or even renaming reality as god only gets in the way of that daily awakening.

Form and emptiness are products of our “mind”, we create “forms” and when we stop sticking “forms” there is “emptiness”.
This to me seems what is called “samsara is nirvana and nirvana is samsara”, it’s the same “thing” with or without those “form creating glasses”.

What we percieve is in the end non-understandable without being put in those little boxes (“form”).
When we stop adding a “name” (i.e “form”) we stop “knowing” (1) what we percieve.
What we know in the end is no more than the sticker we put on “things”.

There is this “undetermined phenomenon” (Kant, if i remember) to which we put a meaning.

What lays beneath (noumenon) is beyond us (Kant again).

According to old masters words, that kensho-shmensho so despised by some, is a(2) way, rather abrupt to say the true, to have a more or less short glimpse to the “formlessness”.
Masters relate that sometimes it doesn’t make sense right away for being so alien, but that its significance seeps slowly.

“Decades later, in the 1960s, Chaitin took up where Turing left off. Fascinated by Turing’s work, he began to investigate the halting problem. He considered all the possible programs that Turing’s hypothetical computer could run, and then looked for the probability that a program, chosen at random from among all the possible programs, will halt. The work took him nearly 20 years, but he eventually showed that this “halting probability” turns Turing’s question of whether a program halts into a real number, somewhere between 0 and 1.

Chaitin named this number Omega. And he showed that, just as there are no computable instructions for determining in advance whether a computer will halt, there are also no instructions for determining the digits of Omega. Omega is uncomputable.

…Number theory is the foundation of pure mathematics. It describes how to deal with concepts such as counting, adding, and multiplying. Chaitin’s search for Omega in number theory started with “Diophantine equations”–which involve only the simple concepts of addition, multiplication and exponentiation (raising one number to the power of another) of whole numbers.

Chaitin formulated a Diophantine equation that was 200 pages long and had 17,000 variables. Given an equation like this, mathematicians would normally search for its solutions. There could be any number of answers: perhaps 10, 20, or even an infinite number of them. But Chaitin didn’t look for specific solutions, he simply looked to see whether there was a finite or an infinite number of them.

He did this because he knew it was the key to unearthing Omega. Mathematicians James Jones of the University of Calgary and Yuri Matijasevic of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St Petersburg had shown how to translate the operation of Turing’s computer into a Diophantine equation. They found that there is a relationship between the solutions to the equation and the halting problem for the machine’s program. Specifically, if a particular program doesn’t ever halt, a particular Diophantine equation will have no solution. In effect, the equations provide a bridge linking Turing’s halting problem–and thus Chaitin’s halting probability–with simple mathematical operations, such as the addition and multiplication of whole numbers.

…Because finding out whether a Diophantine equation has a finite or infinite number of solutions generates these digits, each answer to the equation must therefore be unknowable and independent of every other answer. In other words, the randomness of the digits of Omega imposes limits on what can be known from number theory–the most elementary of mathematical fields. “If randomness is even in something as basic as number theory, where else is it?” asks Chaitin. He thinks he knows the answer. “My hunch is it’s everywhere,” he says. “Randomness is the true foundation of mathematics.”

When suffering exists, the truth regarding the origin of suffering (above) applies, and the truth regarding the cessation of suffering (the cessation of ignorance) applies, and the truth of the existence of a path leading to the cessation of suffering applies.

22. I am afraid I have given you cause to think me needlessly
long-winded in handling this subject. For what is the point
of hammering away at something that can be proved in a
line or two, convincing anyone who is capable of the least
reflection? Look into your own thoughts, and try to conceive
it possible for a sound or shape or motion or colour to exist
outside the mind, or unperceived. Can you do it? This simple
thought-experiment may make you see that what you have
been defending is a downright contradiction. I am willing
to stake my whole position on this: if you can so much as
conceive it possible for one extended movable substance–or
in general for any one idea or anything like an idea–to exist
otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall cheerfully
give up my opposition to matter; and as for all that great
apparatus of external bodies that you argue for, I shall admit
its existence, even though you cannot either give me any
reason why you believe it exists, or assign any use to it when
it is supposed to exist. I repeat: the bare possibility of your
being right will count as an argument that you are right.
23. ‘But’, you say, ‘surely there is nothing easier than to
imagine trees in a park, for instance, or books on a shelf, with
nobody there to perceive them.’ I reply that this is indeed
easy to imagine; but let us look into what happens when
you imagine it. You form in your mind certain ideas that
you call ‘books’ and ‘trees’, and at the same time you omit to
form the idea of anyone who might perceive them. But while
you are doing this, you perceive or think of them! So your
thought- experiment misses the point; it shows only that you
have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind;
but it doesn’t show that you can conceive it possible for the
objects of your thought to exist outside the mind. To show
that, you would have to conceive them existing unconceived
or unthought-of, which is an obvious contradiction. However
hard we try to conceive the existence of external bodies, all
we achieve is to contemplate our own ideas. The mind is
misled into thinking that it can and does conceive bodies
existing outside the mind or unthought-of because it pays
no attention to itself, and so doesn’t notice that it contains
or thinks of the things that it conceives. Think about it a
little and you will see that what I am saying is plainly true;

90. Ideas imprinted on the senses are real things, or do
really exist. I don’t deny that; but I deny that they can exist
outside the minds that perceive them, and that they resemble
anything existing outside the mind–since the very being of
a sensation or idea consists in being perceived, and the only
thing an idea can resemble is an idea. The things perceived
by sense can be called ‘external’ with regard to their origin,
because they aren’t generated from within by the mind itself,
but imprinted ·from outside· by a spirit other than the one
that perceives them. Perceptible objects can also be said to
be ‘outside the mind’ in another sense, namely, when they
exist in some other mind. Thus when I shut my eyes, the
things I saw may still exist, but it must be in another mind

“I am a neuroscientist and so 99% of the time I behave like a materialist, acknowledging that the mind is real but fully dependent on the brain. But we don’t actually know this. We really don’t. We assume our sense of will is a causal result of the neurochemical processes in our brain, but this is a leap of faith. Perhaps the brain is something like a complex radio receiver that integrates consciousness signals that float around in some form. Perhaps one part of visual cortex is important for decoding the bandwidth that contains motion consciousness and another part of the brain is critical to decoding the bandwith that contains our will. So damage to brain regions may alter our ability to express certain kinds of conscious experience rather than being the causal source of consciousness itself. ” “I don’t actually believe the radio metaphor of the brain, but I think something like it could account for all of our findings. Its unfalsifiable which is a big no-no in science. But so is the materialist view- it’s also unfalsifiable” (Lieberman, 2012).

Since we are playing at the level of abstract substances…It can still be the case that there is a kind of internal mental life of matter, or that it coalesces itself into certain material forms, or any number of other scenarios, because these abstract, substance-based answers/questions simply don’t have the sort of connection to empirical matters that their proponents would like to believe.

So like Lieberman is suggesting, don’t make an “either” out of two arbitrarily picked options.

‘God’ is as irrelevant/relevant as – pick a word: “ignorance -> volitive action -> station of consciousness -> conceptualization (name and form) -> nonspontaneous experience of the senses -> nonspontaneous experience of feeling -> craving for feeling -> grasping”… and so on.

It really depends upon the context and mode of expression.

Mark, I wonder if your project to couch Buddhist practice in contemporary scientific terminology leads you to presuppositions about language that are consonant with the pragmatic attitude many mathematicians take when asked to consider Godels Incompleteness etc.: that such considerations have to be put on the back-burner in order to apply what they know to useful things they are working on.

‘Proprioception’ doesn’t have to be real to exist either. It has the positivistically intellectual advantage of indicating other discretely indentifiable phenomena into a scheme that can be embedded in other like schemes and procedures. As such it can be applied to empirical phenomena.

Such systems ‘see’ themselves, and that seeing can aid our understanding of relative phenomena. Yet, when these types of systems for understanding are extended beyond the scope of their utility, I’m reminded of the research that was supposed to prove that Africans are less ‘intelligent’ than Caucasians and Asians.

We are living through times where the anti-myth mentality is so strong, so reinforced by the Spag Monster mongerers, as well as the success of the applicability of its terms in the relevant spheres of engagement, that our notions surrounding and informing the mythic strike me as mere reflections of it. The anti-myth myth, to my mind, manifests own political bias, superstition, symbolic hegemony etc., and yet is locked in by ideological presuppositions that entail mind-sets which assume that in adopting the terms of such systems and schemes that they are already involved in a mode free of those all too rife pitfalls.

A fish out of water dies, and those that eat it might find they get a bad stomach or even die, unless said fish has been freshly caught on our hooks or in our nets. To extend the analogy, I think sometimes we can find ourselves trying to catch fish with our mind-nets and mind-hooks – and succeeding! We eat ourselves up and encourage others to do so too.

Meanwhile there are many sound fishermen who dream of catching that old, fierce pike in the ancient pond, and if they didn’t, how could we find out if it’s possible?

I think you have admirable dreams, Mark, and look like a Fine Fisherman (Form is Form; Emptiness, emptiness).

He says that things exist because we perceive them, or better that God does it for us when we aren’t perceiving them personally (correct me in case).

I’m rather sceptical of either of the two, but the interresting thing is that if you “think hard enough” then “things happen”.
A friend cured his wards visualizing his hand free of them, after reading a book of Bernard Siegel, i have personal experience with healers and other similar things. It goes on with major “miracles” (Spinoza’s brackets) and siddhis …

Now, for me, calling what we can perceive in particular moments as an all pervading “force” or “field” as “god/God” is not only useless to solve the riddle of the three sufferings, but also a rather gratuitous assumption on our side.

We have no clue at all of what things are (undetermined phenomena) once we stop interpreting them through our evolution induced grid (hardwired to transmit genes).

Why is it so alien to conceive that phenomena can have a double nature, light as a particule or a wave? Ok, we can pronounce the words and make the calculations, but can we “know” it? feel it? the same way we think about a falling apple?
And the interference of a single photon … WTF? interference of one photon, what does it interfere with?

Quantum mechanics is actually impossible to explain in words, it’s so outworldly.

IMO then when we “drop (1)” our interpretational grid, we are totally out of our depth, and we start “dressing” the perceived with another layer of “names”/”labels”.
It seems to me as if we can’t stand that unknown we find “out there”(2) and need to bring it back to the “known world”, so to speak.

Giving a name to the “dropped perception” equals to return back to “before the dropping”, putting new shackles after spending so much time trying to free yourself!

Sorry for the form, it’s rather difficult for me to make a linear presentation of this point of view of mine, and i recognize that there are a few non-continuities in this post.
Being a meat and potatoes kind of guy (3) and this subject being rather hairy, so hairy in fact that big brained philosophers have been arguing over it for the last two or three millenia.

In the end it looks to me as if we can’t stand the nakedness of what we find and as soon as we have a glimpse to it we need to cover it with something reassuring.

As if we can’t stand nakedness … WOW ! as in Paradise when Adam and Eve had to cover themselves … interresting …

———-
*thanks again woken for bringing him to my attention
(1) blink blink Dogen
(2) X-files
(3) ah, yeah, BTW, Mark, i’m a dude, don’t take it bad, as much i didn’t take it bad when you though i was a girl, didn’t give a shit actually – LOL LOL, reading again it sounds as if Mark picked me up in a bar, and arriving home he finds a meaty surprise LOL LOL BTW don’t know how you came to think it

“Now, for me, calling what we can perceive in particular moments as an all pervading “force” or “field” as “god/God” is not only useless to solve the riddle of the three sufferings, but also a rather gratuitous assumption on our side.”

Hi boubi,

Using the word ‘god’ is like using any word. Trying to use certain words as explanations for certain things can find us barking up the wrong tree, whatever word we use.

You appear to be thinking about language use in narrowly instrumental and transactional terms, for the purposes of this discussion, and I would agree with much of what you say if we limit what we are talking about to that. But even in that sense, for some people, the word god may be used as a way to highlight aspects that other words such as ‘field’ or ‘force’ might not. There is a reason why scientists extending their explanations to the limits of their and our knowledge, often end up using the word god.

Think about ‘time’. How can we investigate what time is, unless we drop our usual way of thinking and take a look at what’s going on. We might find that ‘time’ as we assumed and commonly understood it doesn’t really exist. And yet, both Buddhists and scientists offering up very counter intuitive explanations for time, still use the word, but it is meant in a much different sense, while still expressing aspects of that previous understanding. The same goes for ‘god’.

But, to my mind, there is much more to our ‘active expressions’ that we don’t usually acknowledge.

I remember reading an American Buddhist’s account of going into a classroom full of young children and making a singing bowl (or something like) ring out into the room until quietness gathered itself up again. He asked them where the sound had gone and one of the children piped up ‘god’. Now maybe having a Buddhist bloke turn up to class, induced some answer that the child thought was appropriate. But, on the other hand, maybe the child spontaneously and intuitively expressed something that was real and intimate, but noumenal and ungraspable, and ‘god’ was the best way for that at that time.

There’s the ‘pen’, and then there’s the contingent emptiness of that designation; when those two foci are not seen as mutually exclusive, even a pen or ‘pen’ or ‘[could you pass me the] pen’ or ‘[that’s my] pen!’ etc., might be full of wonderous and strange mundanity – and ultimately beyond our other descriptions and explanations of each speech event involving ‘pen’.

And what a wonderful thing it is to witness a child naming it’s first things! What an odd thing it is indeed to engage my body and mind, as my lungs gift precious air to my lips and mouth, and form the word pen. Pen.

“You appear to be thinking about language use in narrowly instrumental and transactional terms, for the purposes of this discussion, and I would agree with much of what you say if we limit what we are talking about to that. ”

Let’s start to stop assuming things, as the other time when you talked about “samadhi and sidhis” and i had to show you got a bit confused “syntatically”, after you stating things about “petty intellectuals” or similar.

If you want to start talking about the use of language (narrowly or broadly), please, tell me what is “language”.

I used “field” or “force” in between ” …” marks just to use some wording vaguely correlated to “that thing” that simply has no name for being beyond any wording.

“That thing” is what emerges when we stop … when we stop doing what Adam did in the myth that is : “naming things”.
What is in front of you in this instant in non-knowable to you (as much as to me), we have no clue at all.
But in order to survive we “call” things, as much as we could evoke ghosts. An what we call reality amounts to nothing else as ghosts created by our mind (WTF is it BTW?), things exist, but what we perceive is a figment of our imagination. As much as medieval medecine that thought that illness was produced by spirits or similar.

In buddhist parlance i think it is called “form”, when you take out the “form” you get “emptiness”, as simple and plain as this. But it is so difficult to reach, so alien a concept that it slipped into “religion”.
I’m not at all learned nor versed in buddhism philosophy (which sounds to me as aestethic) but in deep ignorance it looks like that tatagata … hope not to have said some bull.

People who lost sight very early don’t “recognize” anything when they recover sight after surgery.
The same photons hit their retina, as they do to us, but they don’t know yet to stick a “form” to this “formless” input.

Now for the time matter, have a look at this
“parietal lobe during meditation (lower right shows up as yellow rather than the red in the left image). This area of the brain is responsible for giving us a sense of our orientation in space and time. We hypothesize that blocking all sensory and cognitive input into this area during meditation is associated with the sense of no space and no time that is so often described in meditation.”http://www.andrewnewberg.com/research/

“Emptiness” and “no time” come from switching off some brain functions.

What does this imply?

??? don’t know, or at least not sure at all.

That’s why when i hear people saying “it’s this, it’s that” be it a divinity or the other it seems to me they are going back inside the platonic cave conjuring some ghost of a shadow. Renouncing to bask in the nameless.

Berkeley’s argument is usually thought to assume that he believed nothing existed outside of our minds, but this is a mistake. Berlely saying “nothing exists that is not perceived” is analgous to koan such as if a tree falls in a forest and no-one hears it, does it make a sound?

Berkeley points out that our perception of sensation and our attributes of certain qualities to them are separate things, yet we confuse them as being one and the same. Essentially, we confuse our mental creation of our sensations (our mind created imagination) with reality. Berkeley calls this attribution “ideas”. Hence his line: “We eat ideas, we dress in ideas and we bathe in ideas.”

David Hume developed Berkeley’s basic arguments to a more sophisticated level (for example, he showed how we create all sorts of problems for ourselves through mixing up the ideas of cause and effect) and managed to undermine the whole edifice of western philosophy in the process..

BTW, Berekeley also trained as a mathematician and much of his argument was to highlight the limitations of Newtonian physics that was beginning to dominate intellectual life in his time. In doing so, he also posited essentially the same arguments that were put forward by Einstein in his theory of relativity!

BTW, there’s nothing technical or heavy about Berkely whatsoever. If you read and attend to your thoughts (as he advised) you might get the glimpse of his point and see behind the veil. it’s no big mystical thing. it’s just a thing our brains seem to be prone to, and is reinforced by our culture.

Let’s start to stop assuming things, as the other time when you talked about “samadhi and sidhis” and i had to show you got a bit confused “syntatically”, after you stating things about “petty intellectuals” or similar.

Boubi, you’ve got me confused with someone else. I have no recollection of talking about “samadhi and sidhis” ( I don’t know what sidhis are) or “petty intellectuals”. You’re referring to someone else – An3drew perhaps or another Andy/Andrew?

I don’t believe I was making spurious assumptions there. When you wrote about god etc being “useless to solve the riddle of the three sufferings” you are talking about language in term of utility and purpose.

Boubi, you’ve got me confused with someone else. I have no recollection of talking about “samadhi and sidhis” ( I don’t know what sidhis are) or “petty intellectuals”. You’re referring to someone else — An3drew perhaps or another Andy/Andrew?
———————————————————————————————–
It was me! I was the bad person who conflated samadhi with siddhis (though unintentionally) What’s this got to do with the price of tea in China? Why was it brought up in this context? Boubi? Gallic humor?

The “petty intellectuals” is a reference to comments made by some on the Reddit forum that Brad referred to a couple of posts ago.

Oh, I don’t take it bad at all. Like I said, virtually every critic of Berkeley takes him to be a pure idealist and denial of all reality outside of one’s imagination. I was clarifying this fundamental point. His assertion about God as perceiver is worth discussion in its own right, and you’re right, it raises problems, but his initial insights into perception and mind are worth highlighting on their own terms, especially in relation to this post.

As for your questions on koan, I’ve had some experience, but people should attend to their own thoughts and examine this for themselves.

IMO, the insight into the workings of mind plus the “thought experiment” proposed by Berkeley fulfil similar functions, especially in relation to that particular koan, and I believe you will see this.

Sorry for confusing a poster with another, my bad, didn’t take the care to check.

“As for your questions on koan, I’ve had some experience”
Where did you practice?

“Attributing something I said to Andy”
With no avatars it get sometimes difficult to remember who said what, sorry again. Sorry again.

Ok, but beyond Berkeley and others, what do you think happens when we do the idealess/formless thing?
When we stop “naming” things?

What is your take of the meaning and consequencies that switching off some parts of the brain we enter a timeless and empty world?
And from here what about all the chatter philosophers produced about the nature of time, if our sensation of time is produced by a few hundred grams of grey matter?

woken
What do you think about the “wards episode” of my friend?

On my side, i don’t consider myself as “idealist” or “materialist” because i do believe we don’t and cannot know what is beyond our “formating” (form / Berkeley’s ideas*) of the input our senses are receiving (Kant).

Now just for the sake of curiosity, where did Berkeley think those ideas were coming from?

Related to this “formlessness” thing i find that this sentence from the Gospel is fitting pretty well, it makes me want to laugh …

” … and you shall know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free…”

“I taught myself Japanese and managed to land a dream job in a company whose work I had admired since I was seven years old. I published five books and recorded five albums and I’ve been in a few movies. I even made a movie. I’ve done plenty to …”

Being a writer :
– write something new

Being a teacher :
– virtual dokusan
– you can even do virtual seshins, put a camera and life feed teishos (you can even do a few in the same time, time sharing stuff)

Being a speaker of japanese :
– find pupils

Having lived in Japan :
– travel companion to Japan or some tourist related thing

“…..The brain is not a “computer” and the body is not a “machine.” I hate these two metaphors because they create perceptions that are so wrong. Computers run on a series of zeroes and ones—binary …”

Our brain made of neurons, seems to work on binary too, neuron on, neuron off.

A neuron (/ËˆnjÊŠÉ™rÉ’n/ NYEWR-on or /ËˆnÊŠÉ™rÉ’n/ NEWR-on; also known as a neurone or nerve cell) is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information through electrical and chemical signals.
…
If the voltage changes by a large enough amount, an all-or-none electrochemical pulse called an action potential is generated, which travels rapidly along the cell’s axon, and activates synaptic connections with other cells when it arrives.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron

Please notice : “an all-or-none electrochemical pulse” as in 0 or 1.

As in microtransistors in a computer that change of state if it receives a large enough amount of electricity.

No more no less.

Why do we have to be something oh sooo much different?
Are we the marvel in the crown of creation?

Also, how do you know my name? Are you a stalker? Have I gathered that much attention, making people look at my Facebook and not the content of what I say?

Anyways, I gave my 2 centers to this topic by positing Liberman’s opinion on the Hard Problem of Consciousness and my commentary on his quote.

We are not at the point in Neuroscience or empirical science to answer the Hard Problem of Consciousness. The function of science is not to make premature ontological conclusion but rather, to gather experimental data in order to either reject or not reject null hypotheses. A theory is substantiated by falsifiable and replicable evidence, and we can derive predictions from theories or models. However, these models do not lead to any ontological schemas except provisional knowledge we can utilize for the sake of goals.

In this sense, Zen/Chan never provided any ontological abstractions. There is no mind, there is no body. Rigid designationers (in the Kripke sense) do not exist in Zen.

This is why phenomenology > ontology in Zen/Chan. You cannot jump from phenomenology to ontological conclusions easily. I’ve read all of Metzinger’s nonsense, and he never explains what informational content is or how it emerges from physical substances. Quite frankly, I think some humility is needed in order to understand we don’t really understand what we even by physical or information. or example, Chomsky argued the Hard Problem of Consciousness “doesn’t make sense, since there is no cogent way to frame the physical at all – physics, he says, has no definition of ‘the physical’ since it abandoned contact mechanics with Newton – so he says the question ‘is the brain, or this table, physical’ doesn’t make sense, since nothing is physical, there are just different parts of the world that we try and make sense of. His essay ‘Naturalism and Dualism in the Study of Language and the Mind’ makes his position clear” (Brain Science Podcast, 2011)

This is what Nagarjuna pretty much gets at. Ultimately, we can only speak of contingency (i.e., what x depends on for its existence) and not necessity. It leads to an inclosure schema when we acknowledge everything lacks a determinate characteristic (or inherent existence). I remember reading a good analytic philosophy paper on this, but I lost it.

Do not conflate scientific enquiry with Zen. Zen has nothing to provide as Kodo Sowaki rightfully says.

The important think is that you keep taking your medications and keep getting psychiatric help.

Talk to your psychiatrist about your grand vision of what the universe should be and your regulatory role in putting it to shape. Who is needed and who isn’t needed and they ways to solve the problem of the non needed persons.

I think he will get the hint.

Maybe he could implant some device into your brain to stop the episodes, a brain pacer … zapping some area when abnormal activity appears. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt, and nowaday batteries are very small.
You can even get a kick from the zapping, you know it, you should already be a neuro-scientist with all the of your contact with this medical discipline.

You’ll feel better and everybody will feel more secure.
Because it’s a more secure world you want, right?
Ah, yeah, keep watching movies.

boubi, that turned me a good shade of red! As to how I came to mistake your gender, that would be because of posts a long time ago which I don’t think I could find now, but I apologize. Probably my ignorance continued out of wishful thinking on my part that the distaff side of humanity might be represented here regularly (where is Anne MH, when we need her!).

“What an odd thing it is indeed to engage my body and mind, as my lungs gift precious air to my lips and mouth…”- Andy

“Now, for me, calling what we can perceive in particular moments as an all pervading “force” or “field” as “god/God” is not only useless to solve the riddle of the three sufferings, but also a rather gratuitous assumption on our side.”- boubi

“Three sufferings”– three asavas, three poisons? don’t recall three sufferings, but might be there.

ignorance –> willful action–>station of consciousness–>name and form

We got the “name and form” discussion going in this thread, but I like the Gautamid’s causal origination explanation. It posits a reason for an explanation, which is that if ignorance exists, then there is a certain causality leading to the suffering that is “in short, the (five groups of graspings”, and the path toward the cessation of suffering also then exists.

Now the ninth and tenth aspects of what is usually called “the eight-fold path” are right knowledge and right freedom.

“What an odd thing it is indeed to engage my body and mind, as my lungs gift precious air to my lips and mouth…” and gift the relinquishment which is right knowledge and the loss that is right freedom to my eye sockets and bones.

BTW i wrote the three sufferings instead of
— suffering from illness
— suffering from old age
— suffering from death

This is the aim/goal of the whole search (Siddharta’s), and i have the impression that it’s being neglected on this blog, the point being rather to “sit for the sake of sitting” and being buddha as soon as the buts hit the cushion.

I know i’m hitting a raw nerve here, but again, among you soto* people how many are already buddha? I mean i assume you all sat at least once … so ?

And with such a wide sample of living buddhas, anybody can tell me how does it feel to be a buddha?

Please refrain from citing obcure wording from dead people even if more nicely worded.
I’d be very happy to read direct experiences even in broken grammar.

respectfully

gasho _/\_

——-
* again, i hereby declare that, in case some medication deprived psychopath wants to eliminate me, because unworthy of living and not needed in the deluded universal masterplan of the afored said frustrated individual, i don’t have anything against Soto or any other tradition.

The 8thfold path is just a path, a way to avoid getting entangled in attachements, bad psychological situations, it sounds to me some how, as the “preliminary practices” of the Tibetans.

The goal/aim* of the whole “matter” is, to my poor understanding, to get to know our mind’s true nature (1) and as in the Gospel
” … and you shall know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free…” (2)

Mark, i’m just a meat and potato kind of person, but in a way, sometimes, it helps, through dislike and difficulty to bear too much sofisticated thoughts, to get to the core of things.

Mark, try and take out what is not essential, whoever wrote whatever book or treatrise was just a person like you, even Siddharta Gautama had to take a crap once a day and swat the flies away from his arse.

He was a genius like Einstein, but a human being, in the end he died of food poisoning or other wordly cause.
Even Zen is not the think he taught, which should be Theravada, so what?

Know yourself, know the true nature of your mind … and kick any ass that lays betwen you and the knowledge of the true nature of your mind ( Linji Yixuan)

——–
* again, i beg the pardon of those with a much better understanding of The Bard’s language for the not always so precise use of these two words
(1) anybody thinking that it is not the case is welcome to say it
(2) wording used here most probably with a different meaning from the one in the mind of the evengelist who wrote it

“And with such a wide sample of living buddhas, anybody can tell me how does it feel to be a buddha?”

There is no one to experience this Buddhaness. The Buddhaing is the absence of
attachment to any self, thought, feeling.

As for suffering, there is none. A body is meant to die. If ” you ” die psychologically to yesterday ( as Krishnamurti might say ) there is no clinging
to any has to be. Watching the body fall apart as it should, the concept of
suffering has no meaning.

Something about the insults on this blog is very endearing, don’t you think? The threats not so much, but I hark back to the fact that we are all talking primarily to ourselves here, and if I look at a person’s comment in that light it’s mostly compassion for the fate that they are wishing upon themselves that emerges.

And the questions we ask ourselves while under the illusion we are speaking to another– I will try to write something new to myself, so as not to waste time, and I appreciate those who do the same!

How to write, to sit, to do before Mark Foote is born? If I suffer Mark Foote, then right knowledge and right freedom present themselves in every movement of breath. Feels more like letting go of having to know, and a relaxed movement to me; nothing special.

So he abides fully conscious of what is behind and what is in front.
As (he is conscious of what is) in front, so behind: as behind, so in front;
as below, so above: as above, so below:
as by day, so by night: as by night, so by day.
Thus with wits alert, with wits unhampered, he cultivates his mind to brilliancy.

What I dislike is when I respond to a topic and then someone brings up something completely unrelated based off what I’ve said in the past about different topics.

I responded to the subject matter of this post, and I didn’t resort to insults until someone else brought up something completely off-topic attempting to put me down. If you don’t want the comments section to turn into shit-flinging contests, then respond to on-topic posts without bringing up past infantile grudges, boubi. If you keep holding onto grudges and view people as an “accumulative build-up” or a “one-to-one correspondence to one’s projected mental images”, then we can’t even discuss pertinent topics.

It’s not unrelated darling, it’s called cause and consequence, it’s called karma, it shows that your medication is wearing down and that the time is coming to implant you with a schizo-zapper in your brain.

It could turn wrong and you could turn into kind of clockwork orange or terminal man, but it’s worth trying. It’s for your own good, you have to understand.

BTW it’s know that you already threatened a few posters on this blog … life is hard and you lost it.

Weren’t you supposed to dedicate yourself to a life of fame and riches, money and carrier … what?

You flunked?

It’s not a reason to take on other people, could land you in a confined place, eating in a plastic tray and with a couple of alfa men imposing themselves on you 😉 … you know.

Your relationship, do you have to inflate “her” often? It’s good to have someone who just shut the fuck up and listen, like a real man deserves. Do you put her in front of the entrance so that she welcomes you when you come home? And there are the new models, just in case you smash this one … but you know if she deserves it … you are a man who has to be respected, no respect is worrysome.
At least at home you are the one in command.

“Andrew, the reason I would rather want you dead is become you defile the Dharma. I would recommend committing suicide, you aspie. We live in a time where competition for resources is becoming harder, and it is kind of necessary to judge who’s lives are worthless or not. People like you, who do nothing but piss people off, are better off dead, Andrew. Either kill yourself or find some mental help. Do not fuck with people anymore, or I will continue pulling on your strings much harder than you’ve done to anyone else. I really mean it: you are a lonely fucker who has made Zen into a ideological squabble.”http://hardcorezen.info/sexism-and-religion/1204/comment-page-5

As visible here your obsession with “unnecessary people” is not of yesterday, it’s an obsession of yours.

The idea of “defiling the dharma” is rather alike to the insane ideology of Khomeini and of his other demented followers.

Were beated when a child? Your older sibling were competing and winning for your parents care, did you feel abandoned and did you grow a sense of inadequacy that caused a need to compemsate feeling that you needed to become some kind of superior being?

You’re fucked up kid, really, do you realise it?

What happens when M. Hyde takes over? do you kill cats? neighbohood pets?

You’re just fucked up big time

It’s scarry man.

What resources are scarse where you live, and you feel that eliminating “useless individuals” will improve your survival chances?